


Only Enemies

by shadows



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 07:23:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3281888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadows/pseuds/shadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lance wasn't expecting to happen upon the wounded vigilante. He was definitely not expecting events to take the turn that they did. Set in early Season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Enemies

Ever since embarking upon the mission to capture the vigilante, Quentin Lance had been showing up at every crime scene with a reported sighting. Most of the time he was too late, but on occasion he made it in time to pull a gun on the archer, which was immediately shot from his grip with a well aimed arrow before the hooded figure made himself scarce. Even more rarely, he was able to intercept the vigilante before his hasty retreat and wrestle with him until being inevitably overpowered and thrown aside. With both of them at their peak, he knew he didn't stand a chance.

Lance had yet to win a fight with the vigilante, but that didn't deter him. All it would take was one single mistake, he knew, and then he would slap cuffs on the criminal and teach him how justice was meant to be carried out. And despite the body count that had been left behind so far, the archer had clearly avoided any killing blows against the Starling City Police Department. Whatever his skewed misconceptions of justice, it was obvious enough that he had some internally consistent moral code, that he wasn't indiscriminately killing anyone who got in his way. Perhaps that was why Lance didn't feel the least bit worried about continuing to pursue the criminal without backup. At least not until he was given some indication that continued pursuit might risk his remaining daughter receiving news of his death in the line of duty.

He hadn't kept track of the number of their encounters, but as he tiptoed up the staircase of a decrepit, abandoned office building in the Glades where the vigilante had been spotted pursuing some unfortunate dealer or whatever he was after this night, he felt the familiar rush of adrenaline flooding his veins. His lips twitched in a reluctant smile as he quietly pushed open the door at the end of the stairwell. He felt _alive_.

He hadn't really expected to catch up with the vigilante tonight, and he certainly hadn't expected the green leather-clad figure to be leaning against the wall in the room in front of him, turned away from the door, bow tucked under his arm. Lance immediately registered the bodies strewn about. At least eight were visible, several with arrows still protruding from their chests and others with their necks and limbs splayed at unnatural angles. Immediately his gun was pointed at the vigilante's back.

"Freeze!" he shouted. "Don't make a move! Drop the bow!"

The line of the vigilante's shoulders tensed visibly beneath his ridiculous costume, and he straightened up enough that Lance realized he had been using the wall for support. His eyes flickered between the hooded figure and the rest of the room. It had no windows that would allow the archer to disappear on him, and only a single doorway aside from the one through which he had arrived.

Far too quickly for the detective to process, an arrow suddenly embedded itself in the wall only scant inches from his head, splintering through layers of wood and drywall.

_He missed!_

No, Lance knew better. The vigilante didn't miss. A warning shot, then, or a distraction. He was already dashing through the other door, and immediately Lance was in hot pursuit, chasing the hooded figure down a corridor and into an adjoining room that wasn't nearly the dead end the detective had been hoping for. He burst in just in time to see the vigilante heading straight for the window. Acting on pure instinct, Lance squeezed the trigger several times, aiming to incapacitate rather than kill.

The vigilante jerked mid-lunge, throwing him off course, and hit the wall beside the window. Lance wasn't immediately certain whether any of his shots had hit their mark, but _he_ wasn't a killer and his target was down. He holstered his gun as he tackled the vigilante who was struggling to his feet once more, slamming him back into the wall and trying to grab hold of one of those gloved wrists in order to secure his cuffs around them.

\--

Briefly, the world was a blur of green leather, jangling metal cuffs, and shadowed skin as the two men wrestled. Oliver Queen, for his part, fought with a growing panic, blood already beginning to stain his shoulder where one of the bullets had hit. Ordinarily, even that wouldn't be enough to slow him down, much less to give the detective the upper hand, but he had already been injured in the earlier fight. One of the men he'd been trying to subdue had managed to slide a knife into his calf while he was spearing another with an arrow, and that had set off a chain reaction of injuries he hadn't quite been able to dodge in time with his mobility severely limited.

At the moment, his thoughts were on little more than keeping his face angled away from the police detective and his hands out of reach. He had to make it to the window--but even if he could push the other man away and break through the glass, he wouldn't be able to outrun Lance while wounded, and he already knew from his earlier scouting that the buildings across the alley weren't suitable for a zipline. He had no idea how he was going to get out of this situation.

Oliver planted an elbow in Lance's chest, forcing the man just far enough away to buy himself enough room to raise his bow. But Lance seemed to have figured out most of his tricks by now; one arm shot out to block the bow before it could collide with the detective's head, and then a hand wrapped itself around Oliver's fingers, trying to pry them away from the weapon. Forcing himself to ignore the stabbing pain in his shoulder, Oliver snaked one arm up towards his quiver, only to find himself shoved back against the wall again, the detective snarling into his ear as he managed to pull the bow from his grasp and fling it across the room.

Oliver threw himself after it. If he could get to it, he would have enough room to hit Lance in the knee with an arrow, and the detective wouldn't be able to follow him outside them. He couldn't possibly have the same level of pain tolerance that Oliver had acquired over the last few years. But Lance managed to sweep one leg out from under him with a well-aimed kick, sending him crashing to the floor with a pained grunt that the active voice modulator did little to conceal, the bow still far out of reach. He tried to push himself to his knees with his uninjured arm, but the weight of Lance's body was already there, intercepting him, rolling him onto his back. Quickly, Oliver snapped his head to the side, obscuring his face and praying that the building was dark enough to hide his features. The electricity had likely been cut years ago, but a sliver of light too yellow for moonlight, probably from the streetlights on the other side of the alley, shone into the room.

And Lance was pinning him down, trying to grab hold of his arms. Oliver could hear ragged panting; he wasn't sure whose it was. He fought like a wild animal, wriggling furiously and aiming punches at Lance's ribs when he could break his arms away, but his remaining strength was draining and he had the sinking feeling that this was a fight he wasn't about to win. In one more act of desperation, he thrust his entire body up, trying to throw the detective off him, but Lance seemed to be anticipating that as well, pinning his hips firmly to the floor.

Something about the panic and desperation, the adrenaline that had been flooding his veins from the very moment he entered the building, and the grappling with the police detective who had made it his permanent mission to apprehend him, suddenly seemed to cross all of the wires in his body, and he couldn't bite back the involuntary low moan that escaped from his throat as Lance held him down.

Both men froze.

\--

When the vigilante had lunged for his bow, Lance had been unable to miss the smear of blood he left behind on the wall, and somewhere at the back of his mind he filed that tidbit away, perhaps as a weakness or perhaps as something he could investigate later if the criminal managed to escape him again. But the thought fled his mind as he managed to trip the vigilante and send him sprawling, and as soon as the archer was on his back, Lance could see the bloodstain darkening one shoulder and arm of the costume. He tried to catch a glimpse of his face, but the man beneath him was too quick to move his head and his frantic struggling was keeping Lance's hands more than occupied.

At first, Lance wasn't sure he had heard correctly. But as he stared down at the suddenly motionless vigilante, he realized the other man was just as shocked as he was.

"Are you kidding me?" Lance gasped out, trying to catch his breath.

He was already beginning to feel the soreness and bruises developing all over his body; he wasn't nearly as young or in shape as he'd once been. The vigilante didn't respond, but he hadn't begun moving again either, and Lance was just fine with the brief respite. He couldn't stop himself from snarking at his nemesis, though.

"Go figure that _this_ is what gets you off. Y'know, I think everything suddenly makes a whole lot of sense. Why you dress up in leather and prance around town, forcing your victims into submission. You have a thing for control, don't you?" He braced his hands on either side of the hooded figure's shoulders and leaned down so that his mouth was directly beside where he gauged the vigilante's ear to be on the other side of the hood. "You overcompensate like this when all you really want is to be held down." The vigilante twitched slightly, clearly trying to suppress any reaction, and Lance smirked, thrilled to have his hated nemesis so fully at his mercy after so long. "Am I wrong?"

Again there was no reply. But now that the tables were turned, now that he had started teasing the wounded archer, Lance wasn't so ready to let it go. He tightened his fingers around the vigilante's shoulders and squeezed, then slammed them back against the floor.

"Answer me!" he hissed into the vigilante's ear.

He was gratified and somewhat surprised to notice that the vigilante's breathing had sped up and filtered roughly through the voice modulator. Despite his teasing, it was still a bit difficult to believe that he might actually have stumbled upon the archer's kink, much less that this was it. At the same time, he was beginning to feel a bit lightheaded himself from the rush of power he suddenly held over this man, this killer, who had outsmarted and outrun him at every turn. He felt almost giddy.

He hadn't expected the evening to turn out anything like this at all.

"You're wrong," came the vigilante's robotic response. And damn that modulator; Lance couldn't read him at all through the filtering.

His hands slid down the sides of the vigilante's body, twisting through the folds of the cloth and leather in which the man was wrapped, searching for the device. Seemingly unaware of the purpose of this sudden patdown, the vigilante was twisting under his fingers, seeking more contact or less; Lance doubted that even the vigilante himself had any idea at this point, but the struggle wasn't nearly as violent as it had been before.

Suddenly his fingers closed around a small cylindrical device, and he tore it away, holding it up for a better look. The vigilante stilled beneath him and his head turned sharply, a face too shadowed to be distinguishable staring up at him.

"No, don't--"

Lance was surprised to recognize the archer's fear even through the voice filter, but he switched it off and tossed it towards the abandoned bow, his other hand pressing firmly down against the leather-clad chest to keep the archer from intercepting the device. He smirked down at him, meeting the faint glint of the vigilante's eyes that shone through all of the shadows beneath his hood--an almost unreasonable amount of shadowing, and he wondered vaguely how that had been pulled off.

"'Only enemies speak the truth,'" he recited. "'Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.'"

The vigilante stared up at him silently, clearly not trusting himself to speak now that he had been robbed of his false voice.

"So tell me the truth," Lance prompted. "Let me hear the real you. I can already see you."

The vigilante jerked back at that, clearly agitated, his heartbeat racing under the detective's palm, and Lance laughed at him.

"No, not like that. It's tempting, I gotta admit, to pull that hood aside and look at you, but where's the hurry? That comes later." His grin was all teeth, and he pressed himself down against the archer's body, a shock of pleasure racing up his spine. "What you look like doesn't matter. I can see _who you are_. I doubt anyone has ever seen you like this. Am I right? You're not a hero, and I think you know that. Maybe you want everyone to see you as a hero, but deep down you know better. You know you're a killer. How many people have you killed on your crusade; d'you even remember? How much blood is on your hands?"

Lance leaned forward and wrapped the fingers of his free hand around the vigilante's neck as though to strangle him. He could have squeezed so easily. The vigilante's own hands moved hesitantly for his, and gloved fingers wrapped loosely around his wrist, prepared to pull his arm away. Lance laughed at him again.

"You could stop me," he observed, then corrected himself. "Well, you could try. I'm not so sure you'd win right now, but you're not even trying now, are you? Why is that, hm? It's because you know I'm right. No one else sees you like this. No one else sees you the way you really are. Only me. I'm the only person you don't need to lie to because I already know this about you. I know that you're a murderer, a piece of shit."

Slowly, he slid his hand up towards the vigilante's face, his own heart racing with a combination of shock and excitement as the gloved fingers fell away rather than stopping him. His fingertips brushed over facial hair, tracing the outline of a chin and jaw. He stared down into the shadows the hood cast and started trying to superimpose features over the indiscernible face based on what he could feel before suddenly he stopped himself. He wasn't even sure why; he just realized that it was important he not know what the vigilante really looked like right now. He needed the prone man to be something other than human, something less than human, just a symbol for everything that was wrong with the city. An outlet for projecting his own anger and bitterness and hatred.

"You're bleeding," he remarked, apropos of nothing. He grinned again, this time in self-satisfaction, and his voice fell to a coarse whisper as his fingers traced the outline of dry lips. "I made you bleed. I caught you. I can do anything I want to you. Open your mouth."

Lance didn't expect the vigilante to obey, so he was shocked when, after a long moment of hesitation, the lips parted beneath his fingertips. He slipped two of his fingers in to the first knuckle, feeling the scrape of teeth against his fingernails, and for an instant he fully expected to be bitten. But the sound of the vigilante's harsh breathing had picked up again, and after a moment, he felt a tongue swirl tentatively around his fingers. The sensation, coupled with the implication that the vigilante was truly at his mercy, sent a jolt of electricity straight to his groin.

\--

Oliver was stunned. For the last few minutes he couldn't have spoken up if he'd wanted to. More than just the voice modulator, he felt like some part of his outer facade had been stripped away and whatever it had exposed beneath was making him feel incredibly raw and vulnerable.

All the same, he couldn't deny to himself that it felt so unbelievably good to obey Lance's command. It felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders after so long, now that he didn't need to take on the entire world himself and forcibly root out all its evil all alone. It felt like letting go, and the sense of freedom in relinquishing control was exhilarating. He closed his eyes, running his tongue around the fingers in his mouth, and tried very hard not to think about how much the whole situation took him back to his past self, to the person he'd been before donning the hood. Back when he had obeyed nothing but his own impulses and lost himself in these moments. Before he had ever really believed that regrets were a thing he was capable of having.

He wasn't sure why Lance hadn't taken the opportunity to unmask and apprehend him yet, but as the moment stretched out, that thought gradually dissipated into irrelevance. The feel of a heavy body on top of his own and one hand still pressed to his chest, pushing him down, was exactly what he hadn't realized he wanted. The vulnerability and the realization that at any moment he might be found out was addictive and intoxicating, and he shivered. When the fingers slipped out of his mouth, leaving a trail of saliva on his lips and along his cheek, he couldn't bite back a displeased grunt. Somewhere over him, Lance laughed at him again. He knew he should feel humiliated, but it just felt like a taboo and he couldn't resist it. He had never been great at this sort of resistance; he just hadn't expected his poor impulse control to carry over into his secret life quite like this.

"You'd do anything I tell you right now, wouldn't you?"

Lance's voice was rough and sinful through the coarse fabric that separated them. Oliver was overcome with the desire to feel that hot breath directly against his ear, and he reached up to tug the hood aside just enough, but almost immediately, cold metal snapped shut around his wrist and it was pulled back down to his side.

\--

"What--?!"

The vigilante's bitten off cry sounded angry and betrayed as Lance secured a cuff around his wrist. The detective was grinning like a madman as the archer's thrashing picked up again, and once more he grabbed the vigilante's shoulders and slammed him back down, grinding him back into his own quiver. He knew just what the criminal was thinking right now, and he was beyond pleased that he'd finally managed to get a word out of him.

"Oh calm the hell down," he snapped gruffly, trying to sound considerably more irritated than he was feeling. "Don't tell me you haven't done this before. Handcuffs seem right up your alley."

The vigilante seemed to understand that and settled down a bit, although Lance could still feel his heart racing.

"That's what I thought," he agreed, his hand slowly stroking over the rising and falling chest. He rather liked pulling all of these reactions from the man who normally stirred such strong anger within him. He grinned slowly, viciously, and decided he wasn't quite finished yet instilling fear into the vigilante. "How do you think this'll end? Should I put the other cuff on you and take you back to the station? I don't think you'd look nearly so good in orange; do you?"

The vigilante was tensing up again. Lance shifted a bit, enough to straddle him properly.

"Oh, you don't like that, do you? You don't mind shooting arrows through criminals or sending _them_ to jail, but you don't wanna pay a visit yourself. You smell that hypocrisy? Maybe I should just kill you instead. Wouldn't that be fitting? You want to rid this city of murderers, don't you? And by my count, you're among the worst of 'em."

Lance wrapped his free hand around the vigilante's stubbly chin and forced him to look him in the eyes. He stared down at the shadowed cheekbones intently.

" _That's real justice_ ," he hissed, sending another shudder through the athletic body beneath him.

Then he smirked, sitting up again.

"What's the matter, vigilante?" he asked mockingly. "You're quieter than usual. Most days I have to hear from you, I wish I could make you shut up. Know what that tells me? That you agree with everything I said. You finally ready to admit to being a morally bankrupt piece of shit who gets off on taking the law into his own hands? You ready to tell me what an arrogant, hypocritical son of a bitch you are, fine with judging everyone else but thinking yourself above judgment? Huh?"

Lance could see the archer's throat bob as he swallowed. He could feel the hard planes of the archer's chest under his palm. And now he could feel the archer's length grinding slowly up against him, and he realized that he'd been incredibly turned on ever since tackling the vigilante to the floor. He wasn't dismayed by the revelation; somehow it seemed like the only fitting culmination of their chase and all of the pent up anger and adrenaline.

He shifted again, pulling away and holding the vigilante's hips down with one hand, thrilling at the low whine at the back of the vigilante's throat. Sliding his other hand down, he began to trace a slow outline around that leather-clad length. He could feel its heat and weight through the thick fabric.

"What do you want?" he asked, his voice sounding husky in his own ears. "Tell me the truth. Nothing to be afraid of. You know I already judged you. My opinion of you can't get any lower. I want to hear you say it."

The handcuff jangled, its empty half dragging against the ground as the vigilante opened and closed his fist on air.

"Come on," Lance prompted him, pausing in his motions. "Usually you don't have any problem _sharing your opinion_."

The vigilante growled, trying to roll his hips in visible frustration, but Lance held him still without any difficulty. His eyes narrowed. He closed his fingers around the outline of the archer's bulge and squeezed hard. The vigilante sucked in a sharp, audible breath and slammed his head back against the floor. Lance watched him expectantly for a long moment. Just when he thought the vigilante was going to disobey him again, he spotted lips parting in the shadows beneath the hood.

"I want--"

A shiver rolled up and down Lance's spine at the first words the vigilante spoke voluntarily without the modulator. His voice was low and rough and rugged, still sounding distorted somehow, but this time it was either due to his own deliberate attempt at disguising it or due to his tension and exertion. 

"Yes?" Lance prodded.

"I don't care," the vigilante rasped. "I want you."

Lance grinned at that, pulling his hand away and climbing to his feet. How the tables had turned. The vigilante propped himself up on one elbow to watch him, and Lance reached down, grabbing the handcuffs and yanking the vigilante roughly up, eliciting a muffled cry as the forced movement agitated the bullet wound.

"On your knees where you belong," he growled.

The vigilante's movements were considerably less graceful than usual as he complied, and he nuzzled the front of Lance's pants with his nose, exhaling through the fabric. Lance could feel the heat from his breath, and a different kind of heat pooled in his stomach. He grabbed a handful of hood and yanked the vigilante's head to the side.

"If only the city could see you like this now, huh?" he murmured, staring down at the top of the hood. "This is all you really are. A tool to be thrown away when you're no longer useful. And I'll be there to catch you and lock you away, and you'll be forgotten. It's what you deserve. No, it's better than you deserve."

The vigilante grunted in what sounded surprisingly like assent and reached for Lance's waist, unfastening his belt, unbuttoning his pants, and pulling down the zipper. Lance's brow furrowed slightly, but he didn't move to stop him.

"But you know that already, don't you?" he realized.

His brain was already dissecting all of the assumptions he'd made about the vigilante, and rearranging them to fit this new information. He was mildly alarmed at how neatly everything abruptly slotted together, but he couldn't stop himself. It was one of the reasons why he was such a good police detective. He couldn't shut off that part of his brain that never stopped analyzing. One of his hands was stroking the hood in some parody of affection, and briefly, the vigilante leaned into the motion before tugging pants and underwear down just enough for access.

"This isn't about heroism at all, is it? And it's not really about justice either. It's something else. It's not about making others see you as some kind of symbol; it's about how you see yourself." His voice fell to a harsh whisper as a hot mouth closed around his hard length. " _What are you atoning for?_ "

The vigilante's breath caught in his throat for a moment, but then his tongue started moving and his head began bobbing, and all of Lance's thoughts evaporated all at once and he was utterly lost to sensation. The vigilante's fingers were clamped around Lance's hips to steady himself, and Lance pulled one of his hands away from the hood to tug sharply on the handcuff dangling from the archer's wrist. That elicited a groan that vibrated across his sensitive skin and made him shiver. He slipped the other hand underneath the hood and dragged his fingers up the vigilante's jaw and cheekbone.

He could see the distinctive outline of the hood and feel it brush against his knuckles with every movement. He could see the quiver still strapped to the vigilante's back, silhouetted in the darkness. He could even just barely make out the faint shape of the discarded bow lying on the other side of the room. Despite the evidence, he could hardly bring himself to believe what was happening, that he had the vigilante on his knees, pleasuring him. His eyelids fell to half-mast and he just groaned at the sensations that threatened to overwhelm his senses. He wanted to make this last as long as possible, but he could already feel himself tightening, threatening to spill.

"Touch yourself," he growled down at the vigilante. The movements slowed for a moment before the archer's free hand slid from his hip, slowly, as though uncertain. "Hurry up. _I'm_ not gonna do it for you." It was difficult to form words, to stay coherent, but he wasn't going to let the vigilante see any cracks in his armor. "You think you hate yourself? I will always hate you more."

At that, the vigilante pulled his mouth wetly away and Lance could hear him unzipping himself.

"Which one of us are you talking to?" the vigilante said flatly into the darkness.

In response, Lance grabbed the hood with both hands and jerked the vigilante roughly against him again with an angry growl.

"I didn't tell you to stop."

He thought he heard a low chuckle before the vigilante's mouth closed around him again.

"Of course you would pick right now to start getting chatty," he grumbled, ignoring how breathy his voice sounded even to his own ears.

That time he could definitely hear the muffled chuckle, but before he could react, the vigilante swallowed him all the way down to the root in a single fluid motion, and all of the words died on his tongue. He could feel the archer's throat constricting around him, could tell exactly how uncomfortable it was making him, and his fingers clenched roughly around the hood as he came copious quantities into the vigilante's mouth, holding him in place until he was finished and ignoring the vigilante's own desperate, stifled sob.

Then he shoved the vigilante roughly away.

The archer landed hard on his injured side and rolled himself onto his hands and knees, hood falling entirely over his face as he coughed violently and gasped for breath. Lance watched him dispassionately for one long moment, ignoring any sentiment he might have been feeling for the man in that instant. Once the archer had managed to regain most of his composure he sat back on his heels and fastened his pants. Lance smirked, noticing the stain that had spread across the material, darkening it just enough to be visible in the dull yellow light shining in through the window.

He turned his back on the vigilante and tugged his own pants back in place. Behind him he could hear the vigilante trying to clear his throat.

"And you said _I_ talk a lot," the raspy voice whispered.

Lance only smirked again, threading his belt back through the buckle. He heard a soft and all too familiar series of beeps behind him. The vigilante had recovered the voice modulator. Pulling the gun on him and taking him down to the precinct was incredibly tempting, especially considering that he was already partially handcuffed, but something about the idea of actually following through didn't quite sit right with Lance. It felt like the worst kind of betrayal. He heard another softer beep as he pulled up his zipper.

When the vigilante spoke once more, it was without the modulator, but his voice was still ragged and utterly devoid of inflection.

"I don't mind," he said. "It's okay. Blame me so you don't have to blame yourself anymore."

Lance frowned into the darkness for a moment, trying to decipher the meaning behind that cryptic remark, before the image of Sara floated through his mind. His eyes shot wide open and he whirled around, but the room was empty and the window was wide open.

He made no move to follow.


End file.
